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Don't even think about going on a staring contest with this thing.

"What's a giant eye going to do — pick you up and wink you to death?"

From the Latin oculus meaning "eye" and thorax for "chest," this creature's body is primarily an eyeball. Common variants include one giant central eye in a body over a wide mouth, smaller eyes (which may or may not be on stalks) around the central one. If they are nothing but a disembodied eye, they'll become a full Faceless Eye. These creatures are generally able to fly, whether with wings or by some innate levitation ability. If they have limbs, they tend toward tentacles, and their eyes often have special properties like a petrifying gaze or Eye Beams. Because of the symbolism between disembodied eyes and creepiness, creatures like this tend to be evil more often than not. At any rate it is a good way to make something appear truly alien.

A Sub-Trope of Cephalothorax, a creature whose body is mostly head. Not to be confused with a Cyclops or Faceless Eye. Often combined with Giant Eye of Doom. See also Brain Monster, which exposes a different organ instead.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Monster Rancher: Suezo is this.
  • GeGeGe no Kitarō: Medama-Oyaji ("Daddy Eyeball") is just an eyeball on a incredibly tiny humanoid body. "The Birth of Kitaro" briefly showed him walking around on his optic nerves before his body became what it was.
  • Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro: One of Demon Detective Neuro's 777 Tools of Hell is Evil Friday, a swarm of little eyeballs with legs that he can see through. While most commonly used for research, reconnaissance, and tracking, they're shown to have lives and personalities of their own, and one memorable aside shows that they enjoy participating in racing. Why Evil Friday? Who knows?
  • In the Tokkô manga, Kureha keeps a little pet phantom in her jacket pocket that is basically just an eyeball with legs.
  • Dark Schneider from Bastard!! (1988) at one point encounters a beholder, which is virtually identical to the page image.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist: The true, original form of the entity referred to as 'Father of the Homunculi' or 'The Dwarf In The Flask' is a spherical cloud of black smoke with one eye. It occasionally manifests a mouth and a pair of arms as well.
  • Sacrificial Princess & the King of Beasts: Cy is a talking ball with a huge eye, which shares whatever he sees with his brother Clops.
  • Totsugami: One of the monsters that Tasaku used to regularly see at school is basically a giant eyeball with a miniture body attached to it.

    Comic Books 
  • Doctor Strange: Doctor Strange's enemy Shuma-Gorath has no true form, but he prefers a six-tentacled, starfish-like form with a single giant eye.
    • Shuma-Gorath's ancient creation, Quoggoth, appeared in Wolverine: First Class. It appears as a six-tentacled, starfish-like form with MANY eyes.
  • InvestiGators: S.U.I.T. headquarters has a robotic eyeball butler named C-ORB.
  • Justice League of America: Starro the Conqueror is a starfish with one big eye in the middle or at least, post-retcon, his drones are.
  • Legion of Super-Heroes villain Emerald Empress has control over the Emerald Eye of Ekron, a eye a couple of feet tall with the same amount of power as a Green Lantern power ring. As it turns out, it was created by the Green Lanterns and/or belonged to a Green Lantern named Ekron, whose eye(s) got removed.
  • Supergirl: In the storyline The Untold Story of Argo City, Zygors are spacefaring ball-shaped alien monsters with a giant eye, a huge mouth, and prehensile tentacles.

    Films — Animation 
  • Lefty from Meet the Robinsons is this who lives without water, and works as the Robinson butler.
  • Mike Wazowski of Monsters, Inc. skirts the border between this trope and a regular Cephalothorax. He has one very large eye, but a significant amount of his body is not taken up by it.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Big Trouble in Little China had a Beholder-like monster.
  • The aliens in It Came from Outer Space.
  • The Mad Scientist in Freaked has, as his trusty lieutenants, a pair of Rastafarian, machine gun-using eyeballs the height of a normal person. The inherent flaw of such a guardian became apparent when the hero discovers how well A Handful for an Eye works on someone who is all eye.
  • The 1958 B-Movie The Crawling Eye (aka The Trollenberg Terror)
  • One of the creature's in Max's menagerie of specimens in Flight of the Navigator appears to be this. All that is seen is a round "shell" that opens like an eyelid to reveal a single giant eye, but there could be more to the creature that is unseen.
  • Horrific: The monster in the Terror Vision segment is a giant floating eyeball dragging a gigantic optic nerve behind it.

    Literature 
  • Discworld, The Colour of Magic: The Discworld has Bel-Shamharoth, the fact that he has the giant eye bites him on the tentacled butt.
  • The Fighting Fantasy books have Eye Stingers, spiky floating monsters with a single eye who likes to ambush adventurers from dark places. One of them notably shows up in the Lost City of Vatos in Temple of Terror, and its spines can turn victims into stone with a single prick; the only way to defeat it is either by stabbing its central eye or showing it an onyx egg, which will make the monster immobile and close its eye allowing adventurers to pass unscathed.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Beljoxa's Eye in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a... thing made of several eyes.
  • Doctor Who: "The Eleventh Hour" has the Atraxi, which are nothing except a giant eye. Check it out.
  • Ganmons/Opticorn from Giant Robo is an early example of this in the tokusatsu genre.
  • Early Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers monster Eye Guy is built entirely out of eyeballs. His "Core" form is a single Eyeball floating in the air, making him this.
  • Pee-wee's Playhouse once hosted Roger the Monster, a big eye with a mouth underneath, all attached to a foot-like body. Although friendly, it made few appearances, probably due to the prop's cumbersome nature.
  • The popular Ultraman Gaia kaiju Gan Q is essentially just a giant eyeball with limbs (that are also covered in eyes). Appropriately, his name is a pun on the Japanese word for "eyeball", gankyuu

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons
    • The Trope Codifier for modern fantasy is the Beholder, pictured above. These powerful aberrations are eight-foot-wide floating heads dominated by a central eye, which can emit a cone of Anti-Magic, while its ten supplementary eye stalks can fire magical rays with effects ranging from fear and paralyze to flesh to stone and disintegrate. They also have the ability to alter reality while they are sleeping. They come in a surprising number of variants, such as the undead Death Tyrant, the pincher-clawed Eye of the Deep that uses illusions to lure sailors close before stunning them with a blinding flash of light, or the Death Kiss and its blood-draining tentacles. Other beholderkin are simply scaled-down variants with less dangerous eye beams, such as the medium-sized Gauth and Spectator, or the foot-wide Gazer. Beholders are intelligent and often brilliant, but also insane by human standards due to the divide between their rational and irrational minds. They have little love for other races save as food or minions, but they are intensely xenophobic toward other Beholders because they look wrong, i.e. not like the Beholder in question.
    • The Floating Eye is a fish with a single large eye that hypnotizes its target.
    • An Eyewing is an Abyssal creature with bat wings and an eight-foot-long rat's tail. Its four-foot-wide eye weeps an acidic, poisonous blue liquid, which the Eyewing can drop on targets below in the form of foot-wide spheres.
  • Fabula Ultima has the Hexeye, a batlike monster whose body mostly consists of a giant eyeball.
  • Magic: The Gathering has the Evil Eye of Urborg. The Evil Eye of Orms-by-Gore appears to be related, but the artwork is zoomed in too closely to see its full body.

    Video Games 
  • Angband has floating eyes, which are hurt by bright light. There are five versions of the eyes, and they generally do draining or debuffs rather than direct damage. Later monsters in the floating eye group are types of beholders, which have a wider variety of spells and are not hurt by bright light.
  • Barnyard Blast has various flying eyeballs with bat-like wings as a common enemy, as well as a giant eyeball monster as a King Mook variant.
  • Big Karnak have giant eyeballs as minor enemies in the pyramids. Who either bounces after you, or rolls around.
  • Some enemies, and the first boss of Castle in the Darkness have a body that's mostly giant eyeball.
  • Corridor 7: Alien Invasion has the Aliprobe enemies, gigantic, disembodied floating eyes, as well as a Robot Me version of the same enemy type called the Animated Probe.
  • Costume Quest: The "Eyeball" costume in the DLC "Grubbins on Ice".
  • Coryoon has a gigantic spiked eyeball as a mid-boss of the crystal cavern stage, and it's flanked by dozens of smaller eyeball monsters.
  • Deformed floating eyes are enemies in both Crossed Swords games. In the sequel, the eyeball-based enemies grows tentacles and the ability to teleport.
  • The Crystal of Kings have floating eyeball enemies called "Hell's Eye" in the later stages. They have the ability to teleport and electrocute your character if you touched them, and later on you face upgraded Hell's Eyes who can spam a Wave-Motion Gun attack covering much of the screen. The latter, despite being one of the more dangerous opponents encountered, is still a Glass Cannon who dies in two hits.
  • The Run-and-Gun game Demon Front has a variety of enemy in the underground tunnels, resembling a tentacled eyeball which can sting players who got too close.
  • Scrapland: The Beholders are a mechanical version. They're basically floating robotic eyes with one arm on the side of their bodies.
  • NetHack: The Floating Eye, which stuns you for a long time if you strike it.
  • Conan: Hall of Volta: One of the monsters is a large floating eyeball.
  • Golden Force have gigantic stone eyes in the temples as enemies.
  • One of the bosses in Ghoulboy is a giant pink floating head with a single eyeball, and a mouth of sharp teeth.
  • Hazelnut Hex has a gigantic Blob Monster mid-boss whose sole facial feature is it's gigantic eye. It also splits into smaller copies of itself when damaged until it's too small to divide itself.
  • illWill (2023) have a recurring monster resembling a floating purple squid with a gigantic eyeball. Which it can use to fire Eye Beams at you. Naturally, said eye is it's most vulnerable spot.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • Super Mario 64: Mr. I is just an eyeball. It constantly faces Mario, so the only way to defeat it is to run around it quickly until it gets dizzy. A bigger version appears as a Mini-Boss in Big Boo's Haunt.
    • Mario Party 8: The minigame Eyebrawl features two Mr. I looking respectively at two dueling characters. Like in Super Mario 64, each character has to disorient a Mr. I to make it shrink and disappear (though here they do so by making the big eye look at the rapidly-moving pointer of the Wiimote instead of running around). When a Mr. I dies, a bigger one appears in its place and has to be disoriented as well. Finally, a Big Mr. I appears and is the hardest to disorient. Whoever manages to disorient three eyes first wins; in the event both players defeat the Big Mr. I at the same time, or five minutes pass and neither has managed to dispatch them all, the minigame ends in a tie.
  • Final Fantasy:
  • The Cacodemons and Pain elementals from Doom and Doom II respectively. While both are sturdy, Pain Elementals are worse because they can take a beating and spawn Lost Souls on death (along with the ones they spawn as an attack). Brutal Doom and Project Brutality also add variants that are meaner and stronger. Fortunately, the brutal finishers you can do on them are satisfying: Doomguy rips a Cacodemon in half by tearing apart by the jaws, or rips out their eye in the case of both. The latter actually prevents Pain Elementals from spawning Lost Souls because they don't pop.
  • Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army: A betentacled floating eyeball appears as an early boss.
  • Persona 4: Ameno-Sagiri, a giant laser eyeball boss.
  • Shantae and the Seven Sirens: The Spider enemy dangles from a line of webbing, and looks like a single fanged eye attached to a single segment of a small body that's just there so it has legs.
  • Super Smash Bros. Brawl: The Feyesh enemy in The Subspace Emissary is a flying eyeball fish with tentacles.
  • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: One of the major bosses in World of Light is Dharkon. He looks like a giant, corrupted version of the Feyesh from Brawl, but without the fish-based features.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
  • Monster Rancher: Suezoes are naught but eyeballs and mouths on a single tiny tail/foot-like appendage.
  • Soul Series: Charade, of Soul Calibur, is a humanoid with an eyeball for his thorax. He still has a faceless "head" too.
  • Overlord has beholders that teleport enemies into combat, as well as projecting an energy field directly below them that vaporizes minions and inflicts heavy damage on the Overlord.
  • The (very low-level) Aibatt mobs in Fly FF.
  • The MARDEK series has several floating eyeball monsters, most of them Palette Swaps based on element, but in a bit of a twist they each usually have a "polyp" form as an eyeball stuck to the ground with a stem that is explained to eventually grow into the floating eyeball form.
  • Kirby: Many of the enemies and bosses in the series are like this. In no particular order, there's Kracko, Dark Matter, Dark Nebula, Zero, Zero-Two, Drawcia Soul, Dark Mind's second form, Dark Crafter, Star Dream's first and second form, and Void Termina's final form.
  • Team Fortress 2: The MONOCULUS. After the Bombinomicon haunted the Demoman's left eye as a child, Merasmus decided that the best course of action was to magically remove said left eye, lest the Bombinomicon spend all eternity bragging about it. When the Soldier breaks Merasmus's staff during a fight in the present, Merasmus retaliates by unleashing the Demoman's left eye, now turned into a giant flying eye monster, upon the mercenaries. Eyeaduct features a King of the Hill map where MONOCULUS occasionally shows up, whereupon both teams are forced to stop fighting each other in order to kill it.
  • Ascendancy: The Oculons, although, unlike most of the other examples here, they're a race of chivalrous astronomers, rather than being evil or otherwise disturbing.
  • Pokémon:
    • Magnemite, Magneton and Magnezone are made up of floating metal spheres with a single eyeball in their centers. Duskull plays with this in that it wears a skull mask to hide the single eye visible through the eyeholes.
    • Subverted with Roggenrola — what looks like its eye is actually an ear. It lives deep underground, and as such is completely blind.
  • Might and Magic has Evil Eyes/Beholders, which are heads with a single giant eye floating on tentacles, optionally with additional eyes on eyestalks. They were created by a mad mage to serve as living weapons, and do well in that role even if they hadn't entered service by the time the war they were made for ended.
  • Devil World has Medaman, who thanks to a Japanese Visual Pun turns into a fried egg when defeated by fire breath.
  • World of Warcraft: "Floating Eye" demons. (The model's file name is "beholder.") The Throne of Thunder raid added the boss Durumu the Forgotten, whose fight revolves around various eye-themed attacks.
  • Monoeyes from the Kid Icarus series are exactly what they say on the tin.
  • Castlevania: "Flying eyes" (which sometimes have tails) are common enemies in the series.
  • The CWU-01P from Mega Man can qualify if you count that gem-like thing he has in the centre of his body an eye.
  • Mega Man Battle Network: The Killer Eye viruses. They stay perfectly still and attempt to zap anything that enters their line of sight with a paralyzing beam.
  • Chantelise and Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale from the same universe, have the bat-winged Eyebats.
  • Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones: The Mogal and its upgraded form, as part of the Demon Hordes.
  • The Ultima series has Gazers, which look like the D&D creature but aren't called that for trademark reasons. When killed, they release insects, making them Bee Holders.
  • Manhunter: Orbs — the aliens that conquered Earth. Especially the variety holding New York in the first game — just carnivorous floating eyes.
  • Geneforge: Gazers and eyebeasts are for all intents and purposes renamed beholders with a smaller main eye.
  • Avernum originally had gazers and eyebeasts resembling shapeless floating blobs with many eyes. In the recent remake, however, they became just like their Geneforge namesakes.
  • Dragon's Dogma: Evil Eyes, Vile Eyes and the Gazer are similar to beholders, save for the "eyestalks" having mouths on the end.
  • Lucifer Ring has the "Median" enemies, waddling eyeballs on two legs, as the second-most-common enemies encountered. They're no less stronger than the purple ogres (which is The Goomba) but they're slightly harder to hit because of their size.
  • Eye Brawl in Skylanders: Giants has a large monstrous body with a single giant eyeball for a head. Among his powers is the ability to launch his eye/head, which flies around the screen damaging enemies. His catchphrase is "I've got my eye... on you!"
  • Evil Islands: The three varieties of Evileyes (regular, red and green) are big, floating eyes that shoot powerful fireballs at you.
  • Portal 2: Wheatley and the other Personality Cores are spherical entities resembling disembodied mechanical eyes.
  • Gate Of Doom: One of the bosses resembles a large eye surrounded by many smaller eyes.
  • Deadly Rooms of Death: Evil Eyes. They face a particular direction, and wake up when you step into a square in their line of sight. However, once woken, their behaviour is identical to roaches.
  • Touhou: In the second game, Story of Eastern Wonderland, flying eyes with bat wings are a common enemy in the first couple stages. The game's superboss is a giant mechanical version called "Evil Eye Sigma", built by the stage 1 boss Rika.
  • ShadowCaster:
    • One of the forms available to the player is the Opsis, a round, floating spheroid being with a large mouth, feeble tentacles, and a single, large eye at its centre.
    • Amongst the player's foes are beings similar to the Opsis: round, floating bodies with single large eyes. In place of tentacles, however, their sport a pair of clawed, two-fingered arms. They attack by firing various magical blasts at the player from their eyes.
  • Shantae and the Pirate's Curse has the Cyclops Plant boss, which is a giant, floating, laser-shooting, slime-dripping eyeball protected by an equally large plant.
  • In the world "Spooked" of Monkey Shines, there are mooks which are just eyeballs that jump, float or roll around.
  • Subnautica has a few examples of this, most prominently the Eyeye and its Lava Zone equivalent. The Peeper and the Oculus also follow this trope to a slightly lesser degree.
  • The Breach: One of the more common (and annoying, due to their tendency to approach from an angle) enemies are floating brain-like aliens with a single huge eye at the front.
  • Zombidle: The Swarm of Bats mook is a swarm of bat-winged eyeballs with a disturbingly chipper personality.
  • Tallbirds in Don't Starve are basically a giant eyeball on long, skinny legs, plus a beak and wings of middling size. They spend all their time in their nests guarding their eggs, and are hostile to anything that approaches them including other tallbirds. Adult tallbirds are flightless, but baby ones (known as smallbirds) can hover a little. Smallbirds eat seeds and berries at first and then become voraciously omnivorous as adolescents, but adults don't seem to eat anything. Maxwell describes them as a failed experiment.
  • The Oculi in Mass Effect are attack drones that resemble giant mechanical eyes. The Reapers use them for anti-ship combat.
  • Rayman 2: The Great Escape has Jano and the Mini Janos. They dig into the ground, breathe fire at Rayman and try to eat him.
  • In Cookie Clicker, the final form of Santa Claus is a floating tentacled white orb with a single red eye.
  • Giana Sisters DS: Eyes and Killer Eyeballs look like classic Dungeons & Dragons Beholders, except they are pink and cuter. Killer Eyeballs are larger and shoot fireballs.
  • Super Dungeon Bros: Besides the MANY skeletons, one enemy type you'll face in the game are winged eyeball creatures who shoot Eye Beams at the knights.
  • Ratatan: As seen in the trailer, regular regular player and enemy units have one eye. Hero units, who are more humanoid, all wear an Eyepatch of Power of some kind.

    Webcomics 
  • Junior in 1/0 is literally a sapient eyeball — he was made by Tailsteak removing and animating another character's left eye.
  • Cosmic Dash: Wots (Guugel's species) are roughly two heads tall, and most of their head/torso is a single big eye (they don't even have a mouth, as according to supplemental material, they feed through their extremities).
  • The Order of the Stick has Sunny the Beholder, though characters don't outright state they're a Beholder.
    • An early comic has lawyers showing up with a cease and desist letter because the Mind Flayer currently being used isn't part of the open license. After the mind flayer is hauled away, the party tells a Beholder "We'll get back to you".

    Web Original 
  • Neopets formerly had the Fleye, which was eventually redesigned into a dragonfly-like Neopet called the Buzz.
  • Mortasheen has the Oculapus, an octopus creature that can transfer what it sees to its creator over a distance of miles. It's also severely agoraphobic, and uses an old-timey diving helmet to shield itself from the outside world.

    Western Animation 
  • Jonny Quest:
    • Dr. Zin's Robot Spy is a Spider Tank composed of a giant eye in a ball, set on spider legs.
    • Several more of them appear in the Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures episode "The Robot Spies".
    • The title creature in "The Invisible Monster". It's a tear-drop shaped mass of energy with one large eye in the center of its "forehead".
  • Ninjago: The Preeminent, leader of the Cursed Realm (and in fact the realm itself), is an eye with tentacles coming off of her. When she crosses over into the realm of Ninjago, she becomes a Kaiju Eldritch Abomination and uses ghost-ified houses and buildings to enhance her physical form, giving herself limbs.
  • In The Venture Brothers, Doctor Venture builds a robot that's almost identical to the Robot Spy as one of the series' many Shout-Outs to Jonny Quest. It is later used as a new body for H.E.L.P.eR.
  • ReBoot features this as a sprite in one of the games. A single eyeball that uses its nerves and veins as limbs, like an octopus.
  • The Eye from 12 oz. Mouse is a giant eye with legs and a mouth. Other characters comment on how gross he is.
  • On an episode of Regular Show, Benson hires one of these named Peeps to watch Mordecai and Rigby to ensure that they don't slack off, but he didn't read the fine print that said Peeps will watch over everyone in the park till they die. In order to make him leave, Mordecai challenges him to a staring contest (which he wins when Rigby uses a laser pointer on Peeps after he cheats by growing extra eyes).
  • William, a character from The Amazing World of Gumball, is an eyeball with wings.
  • Futurama: The crew comes across the beholder from the 1st Edition AD&D Monster Manual, acting as a sentinel in the Central Bureaucracy HQ. It's sleeping, they slip past it, and the thing starts whining about its supervisor.
  • The Powerpuff Girls:
    • The Monster of the Week of the 1998 series' episode "The Mane Event" is a beholder-like creature consisting of black orb full of blue eyes. It's large enough to block out the sun's lighting in Townsville, and its eyes shoot vaporizing lasers. It can only be attacked when its eyes are shut.
    • While the real villains in the 2016 series' episode "Rebel Rebel" are the Beaker Boys, the episode's plot is mainly driven by Mr. Big Eye, a giant tentacled eyeball monster who was created by Professor Utonium while being tricked by the Beaker Boys. Much like the aforementioned monster, Mr. Big Eye attacks by shooting lasers, though he only has one eye and walks on the ground with his tentacles rather than float.
  • One Monster of the Week in My Life as a Teenage Robot is Infrared Ivan, an invisible eyeball who steals eye-based items (like glasses) by fooling people into thinking he's an invisible man with a coat and hat dangled on one of his tentacles. After reluctantly wearing the super-sensory (but embarrassing-looking) new eyes her mother made, Jenny exploits Ivan's weakness by kicking sand into him... which he then humorously subdues himself by picking up all the wrong things to help the burning (hot sauce, a magnifying glass, and a pointy stick).
  • In Gravity Falls, Ford studied "eye-bats", which are literally giant eyeballs with bat wings.
  • A Friendly Neighborhood Spider version is present in Pocoyo, in which spiders are depicted with a single eye, but they're all nice, especially Baby Spider from the episode "Pato's Egg".
  • Making Fiends:
    • One of the most common generic fiends seen in both series (mostly in promotional material) are simplistic black circles with a single eye and wings.
    • An eye with limbs is seen in the Onion Stand commercial from the TV series' episode "Shorts: Set 1".

 
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Niru and Qaedam

Even zombies have homework. So when Niru's son Daimon is having trouble with a math problem, Niru quickly runs out of options when trying to help, and resorts to summoning the inventor of necromancy and master of the undead.

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